Anybody who was nearly everybody . . . Probably because they were easily connected and because no one stayed around so that coming and going was bound to result in one or two misses and that with a litttle digging . . . K. Roberts
Kelyn Roberts Comment on Diebenkorn Criticism, Ocean Park Anthology, 2004,
The paintings, prints and drawings of Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park Series are representations of Ocean Park itself; they are all the more recognizable either as landscape, seascape, or their fusion. While much of the critical discussion of Diebenkorn's work link him to art historical communiities of thought, their language also serves as a metaphor for the actual description of wave and fog, of horn, helicopter and crashing surf, of traffic wedged onto shifting and shifted edge, and architecture: warehouses, factories, apartments, studios, houses and homes which assert verticality across the sweep of ocean, beach, strand and dune, like the bay itself strata of time, saturation and a saving emptiness. The paintings and descriptions of the landscape and the paintings offer their own idealized versions of Ocean Park.
The closest place to see his work that I know of is the orthopedic offices on the ninth floor of the west medical tower at Santa Monica Boulevard and Twentieth Street where a Frank Stella three dimensional print, a beaten metal assemblage and a Diebenkorn print function as windows by self-multiplication in mirrors.
"Other imaginings include Ocean Park, The Animated Feature Film which includes "the sophisticated super-hero Abbot Kinney, perhaps choosing an opera cape, setting fires by flicking one of his specially prepared Turkish cigarettes, into the dreams of his corrupt rivals."